Dr. Steve’s Tips

With today being Father’s Day, and so many dads being the family’s handyman-in-residence, maybe for this one day you’ll want to hold-off on asking him to fix stuff.

But on every OTHER day of the year, the days that are NOT Father’s Day, we suggest there are some repairs you might never ask him to fix. Those repairs that might cause dad to hurt, maim, or kill himself. Or your marriage. Or your ability to enter one of your rooms ever again without thinking about how bad it looks.

So as our Father’s Day gift to you, Fix St Louis has compiled this list of the 5 things you might never want to ask dad to do:

1. Install Crown Molding

How hard could it be to make those 45 degree cuts in the crown molding at the corners of the room, and get the 2 pieces to fit together snugly, right? But, the crown molding itself is installed on the wall at an angle, so you’re actually trying to make TWO angled cuts at the same time. If dad has never done this before, preferably 2-3 times, and you don’t want to buy twice as much crown molding to waste before he figures this out, it’s best to call Fix St Louis.

2. Add Insulation to the Attic

That slick Pink Panther they use in their ads tricks a lot of dads into thinking nothing could be easier than rolling out that insulation across your attic floor. But that false sense of confidence lasts only until the moment your dad actually ENTERS the attic. Then, he’ll realize that unless he lettered in the balance beam in high school it’s difficult to move around by stepping only on the edges of joists, without stepping on, cracking, or falling through the drywall between them. Incidentally, that drywall is otherwise known as the ceiling to the floor below. Not to mention doing this in a space that is usually EXTREMELY hot or cold, with a ceiling full of the sharp business ends of roofing nails pointed right at his head.

3. Join Copper Pipes

Joining 2 copper pipes together using a propane torch might seem like a manly endeavor, but the frustration of doing it over and over again until there isn’t the smallest trickle of water coming out of the joint can turn any dad into a whimpering baby. In the process he’ll learn a couple of things, like the pipes have to be totally dry to make it work, which isn’t easy, and that while water may seem dumb it’s actually a Fulbright Scholar when it comes to finding any area that it can pass through no matter how small. Yes, dad can learn how to do it, but with as infrequently as he will do it, and that it will be so long until he does it again that he won’t remember, wouldn’t his time be better spent with your family?

4. Repair Three-Way Switches

You know how sometimes there’s 2 switches that operate the same light on opposite sides of a room or hallway? And do you notice that ‘2’ is not the same number used in the name of a 3-way switch? If dad’s troubleshooting or installing these switches, he’ll soon understand why trying to figure them out is not worth his time.

5. Anything Involving Getting on the Roof

To be clear, it’s not getting ON the roof that is the problem. It’s falling OFF. Either the roof or the ladder. And for those of you living in those fancy-shmancy houses with vaulted ceilings and roofs some mountain climbers would be afraid to scale – wouldn’t your family rather have dad around than just the proceeds of his insurance policy? (If not, make sure your family doesn’t come within 50′ of the bottom of his ladder).

So, let me wish a happy Father’s Day to all dads out there. And when it comes to home repairs, keep in mind that Fix St Louis is here to help him. Not put him out of a job.

When you think about it, isn’t it amazing that Americans now EXPECT the inside of their homes to always be the SAME TEMPERATURE? Every single day of the year? No matter what’s going on outside? As they might say at the Yakov Smirnoff dinner theater in Branson, “What a country!”

And, just like the final act of every show in Branson we, too, at Fix St Louis salute America’s exceptionalism and progress, so make no apologies for our nation’s unending quest to make our homes more comfortable. We pay no heed to those handwringing, cardigan-wearing naysayers who tell us we must scale-back our lifestyles – those people who THINK of themselves as ‘sophisticated’ yet, would you believe, have never even HEARD of the Baldknobbers or the Dixie Stampede?

Here are just a few of the ways Fix St Louis can help you, with little to no sacrifice, put an end to climate change on the inside of your home:

Weatherstrip around your front door to keep cold air out.

Place ceiling fans throughout your home, even on ceilings that have no wiring.

Add insulation to your attic.

Install a whole house fan on your hallway ceiling to cool your home in the pre- and post-air conditioning seasons.

Add an attic fan to keep your attic from getting excessively hot, which can trap hot air in your home.

Fill-in all the gaps around your house using caulk, mortar, lumber, and siding.

Let’s show the rest of the world how to live as we seek life, liberty, and the pursuit of comfort, which I’ve got to believe is a necessary subset of “happiness,” am I right? Let them have their Paris. We’ll always have Branson.

With all that violent weather passing through our area last week, you’d think something calling itself a ‘storm door’ would have its opportunity to shine. So, what’s with that flimsy extra door, anyway? That gender-conflicted door that can’t seem to decide whether to self-identify as a window or a screen? That awkward, spring-loaded door that might possibly be the only product in America that actually OUGHT to have a government-mandated warning label, which would read “don’t let this door hit you on your way out”?

Since they don’t write history textbooks about storm doors, let me tell you what I think happened. At one time, most homes had removable glass storm windows to provide extra insulation to the then-standard single-pane glass windows. And in warmer weather, you could swap them out for window screens. But new technology made these storm window/screens obsolete, and they were replaced by better-insulated double-paned windows with sliding half-screens.

Now, storm windows had a cousin – storm doors – which similarly provided extra insulation for the single-pane glass panels on doors. So, storm doors could have just gone away, too. But some people found it was pretty handy to have a door opening that could be covered by a screen. And, storm door manufacturers came up with some excuses (pretty lame in my opinion) for still keeping a glass storm door. Like keeping snow drifts away from your front door, or providing extra insulation for the not-always-perfect weatherstripping around doors.

Personally, I kind of like storm doors, but just when they act like screen doors. They’re great for air circulation when you turn on a whole house fan at the same time, and can reduce the number of days you run your air conditioner. They’re also great when you want to talk to someone at your front door, but don’t want your pet to bolt outside, or to greet too enthusiastically your friendly handyman or others. But, you don’t really have to make a choice between your storm door being made of glass or screen. We can install a “self-storing” storm door that quickly converts between the two.

Incidentally, Fix St Louis can also FIX your storm door. We’re often asked to replace that door closer that looks like a bicycle tire hand-pump, or reattach it to the door jamb, or restore and paint the door jamb that it cracked. We can also replace that torn screen.

In a more logical world, a “storm door” would be the name for that hatch that Auntie Em, Hunk, Hickory, and Zeke climbed into as the tornado approached, but Dorothy & Toto didn’t reach in time. Nonetheless, while storm doors won’t save your life and can be a nuisance, there’s still reasons you might want Fix St Louis to install or repair them.

Think about it. Water now accounts for 71% of the earth’s surface, 60% of our body weight, is smart enough to locate every hole as small as a pinprick on our houses, and evil enough to enter and create damage. And every once in awhile, this alien mocks us by turning Fenton, of all places, into an isolated, remote, supra-tropical retreat.

Last week, we St Louisans successfully fought-off this liquid foe, and it eventually moved on. But, what weapons should homeowners be adding to their arsenals right now to prepare for the next aerial assault?

No, silly, not water guns. They just make the problem worse. Instead, we at Fix St Louis suggest the following:

Flashing

No, I’m NOT talking about what you fear every man prancing around in a raincoat, other than Gene Kelly, might do next. Flashing is about metal strips installed outside, mostly above windows, doors, deck ledger boards, and beneath roof vents, to direct water away from the cracks where two separate building materials meet. If your builders and remodelers installed things properly, this should never be a problem. But sadly, there are no perfect builders or remodelers on this side of heaven.

Caulking

Caulking kinda works like flashing, but it’s for all the other gaps in your home where water might intrude. You’ll mostly find it around windows and doors, but it’s used in other places, too. Unlike flashing, caulking is not permanent, and it degrades and gets ugly over time. So, Fix St Louis gets regular calls to check and replace caulking – and not just on house exteriors, but also around tubs, showers, and sinks, too.

Sump Pumps

If you have a perfectly circular hole cut in the floor in a corner of your basement, that was not put there by some desperately hungry, but misguided ice fisherman. That hole collects water from an invisible channel that runs beneath the perimeter of your basement floor, and if there’s a ‘sump pump’ in there, every time the water level gets too high it pumps the water out through those pipes around it. If you have a broken sump pump or a hole without any sump pump at all, we can install one (if you don’t have a hole, we can refer you to either an ice fisherman or a foundation company). We can even install sump pumps that have an alarm and a battery backup, in case your house loses power.

While they say you can fight fire with fire, when it comes to water, not so much. Let Fix St Louis help you fight off this existential threat to humanity.

Dr Steve

Hey, your Great Room with the 2-story vaulted ceiling looks really great and all that, and I’m sure your home builder boasted about how spacious it made your house seem. But now that your builder is long gone and has cashed his check, you begin to wonder. How on God’s green Earth am I going to change a light bulb that’s 17′ up in the air?!

No problem, you figure. The last time you were in Home Depot, didn’t you see a light bulb changing kit that included an extension rod with all sorts of nifty light bulb grabbing attachments you could put at its end, like a suction cup, a basket, and a wad of used bubble gum? But if you had actually BOUGHT it and tried to use it, you’d know that you might just as well be a circus performer spinning plates at the end of that rod. And also that you forgot to buy two more things needed to change that bulb — a 10′ step ladder and a crash helmet to protect you from aerial bombardment by kamikaze bulbs that refuse to get suctioned or leap gracefully into the basket.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of more things builders do to make a house more showy, but leave homeowners helpless to do normal maintenance. How about climbing onto one of those modern, ultra-steep roofs that even a mountain goat isn’t crazy enough to get up on? Or that cedar deck whose boards will soon start fraying at the edges unless you stain it every 2 years? Or asking the crew from Merry Maids if they would kindly clean that window above your front door two-stories up?

Now I know that some of you are too young to remember this. But, I think it was maybe, oh, about two weeks ago that there was something called the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus. And they had parades of elephants that were quite a spectacle. Now, think of your builder as the ringmaster, and think of those huge beautiful creatures as the houses he was showing-off, that captured your attention. Now, think of those men with the push brooms at the end of the parade. That would be us, Fix St Louis.

So, call Fix St Louis whenever you need to perform one of those impossible maintenance feats the builder didn’t warn you about. We can even make some of them go away, e.g. by staining that cedar deck with a deck paint that you would only have to re-paint as often as you would have to re-paint a house, not every couple of years.

Let’s finally talk about those maintenance elephants in the room. And don’t worry, we’re actually quite good at cleaning-up after ourselves.

Sure, the Redbirds just won their home opener against last year’s World Series Champs but, hey, we’re talking about the Chicago Cubs for crying out loud. On the other hand, we at Fix St Louis work on home openers just about every day, and we have never been defeated. Not once.

Doorbells

Once upon a time, front doors had all kinds of uses. They were a place to bend down and pick-up newspapers, Yellow Pages, and milk that came in glass bottles, and to greet overly-friendly Fuller Brush Men, encyclopedia salesmen, and Avon ladies. But these days, people seem to forget they even HAVE front doors. They always enter through the garage. And, they’re so frightened by what they watch on the 10 o’clock news that when the doorbell rings they hide behind furniture, lest the possible ax murderer outside spot them through the window.

But let’s face it, people. Unless you own a dog, you NEED a working doorbell. Or you’ll never meet your neighbors. Or, the kids next door. Or your neighbors’ kids selling cookies and unwanted magazine subscriptions for fundraisers. Or that grubby man with missing teeth who comes around each year to sell mulch.

The state of doorbells that we at Fix St Louis see every day is nothing less than shocking. I swear, about half of them don’t seem to work at all, or the plastic button is cracked open, exposing a teeny-weeny light bulb. Some houses confront you with a wide array of choices, including a non-working intercom station with a button that may or may not be a doorbell. Or a large control panel with the Nu-Tone brand name that looks like it was ripped off the set of Disney’s Carousel of Progress and includes a blender, an AM radio, and can spin 45 RPM vinyl records. BTW, nothing on that control panel works either.

Give us a call, and you will learn how easy and inexpensive it is to get your doorbell working again. Usually we can use the existing wires, but the new wireless models work great, too. We can even install integrated video cameras so you can remotely see who’s at your door, with the small downside that so can the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies who like to keep tabs on who you’ve been meeting.

Garage Door Openers

Scary, but true. The average homeowner is never more than one step away from a barbaric world in which they’d have to stop their car on the driveway in the rain, step out of the car, walk to the garage door, pull it up, walk back to their car, drive in, then reach up and pull the garage door down again. The HORROR!

We at Fix St Louis can do a number of things to help. We replace garage door openers, as well as their light bulbs. We can install a dedicated electrical outlet nearby so it conforms to building codes, and eliminate that extension cord tacked to the ceiling that you know is all wrong. And, we can install keypads outside that open the garage door, so that when you unlock the door to your house inside, no one needs a key, not even kids who might lose it. That means you can toss that fake rock in your yard that has a compartment for a key, and that is often so conspicuous that it fools no one. Not even woodpeckers scared by fake plastic owls. Who, truth be told, really don’t fall for that trick anymore, either.

And, oh yeah, we can change your door locks, too.

Just think about how far we’ve come in America with our home openers. Only 100 years ago nobody in St Louis even locked their doors. It must be true — I heard it at Disney’s Carousel of Progress.

FIX St. Louis is the professional alternative to hiring "Chuck in a Truck" or "Pete in a Pickup," if you know what we mean! Our technicians have at least 10 years of experience, are bonded and insured, and show up at firm, scheduled times. We provide full customer service and guarantee our work for a year.